The Stars My Destination

By: Alfred Bester

Narrated by: Gerard Doyle

Marooned in outer space after an attack on his ship, Nomad, Gulliver Foyle lives to obsessively pursue the crew of a rescue vessel that had intended to leave him to die.

When it comes to pop culture, Alfred Bester (1913-1987) is something of an unsung hero. He wrote radio scripts, screenplays, and comic books (in which capacity he created the original Green Lantern Oath). But Bester is best known for his science fiction novels, and The Stars My Destination may be his finest creation. With its sly potshotting at corporate skullduggery, The Stars My Destination seems utterly contemporary, and has maintained its status as an underground classic for over 50 years.

©1956 Alfred Bester; copyright renewed 1984 by Alfred Bester; special restored text of this edition copyright 1996 by the Estate of Alfred Bester; Introduction copyright 1996 by Neil Gaiman (P)2017 Tantor

Gully Foyle is his name!

This 1956 classic is a true gem,and is easy to see the influence it has had on Sci fi books and movies ever since. This is the story of Gully Foyle who just jaunted to the top of my list of most memorable characters, Gully is a big brute with a bigger heart and a tribal style tiger mask tattoo'd over his face, making him quite an oddity in an world that hasn't seen a tattoo in centuries. Now Gully is turning this world on it's ear looking for revenge.but ends up finding much more.

How this has yet to be made into a movie is baffling,especially when considering all the crap that does get made

Still Best

Read this twice over the he years , and loved listening to it third time round. One of the best science fiction stories ever!

My first SF read still holds up...

First off, let’s be clear about one thing: the title of this book is “Tiger! Tiger!”, OK? OK. Regardless of its various publishing incarnations, that’s the title I first read it under, and for me it’s the TRUE title of the book.. Anyway, in terms of its importance to SF overall, this book should rate an A+. Also in terms of its importance to ME… A+. This was after all the first adult SF novel I ever read, and the reason I became an SF fan and wannabe SF writer. This is the wellspring! And it does hold up pretty well after 7 decades, much better than many another SF “classic,” so I can’t complain. But I CAN quibble! Bester did an amazing job of avoiding technological obsolescence by keeping the tech stuff vague. He also did a fairly good job of avoiding sociological obsolescence by having a good reason why gender inequality should still exist in the 25th century, but reading this book in the “me too” era makes it impossible to overlook Gully Foyle’s rape of Robin Wednesbury. That said, this book still stands as a classic in a lot of ways. It is one of the best novels to explore the concept of obsessive revenge, in any genre. It is an excellent piece of world-building – exploring the societal impact of “what if all of us could teleport” in a brilliant way. And it’s just a fine piece of action story-telling, with a killer pace and not one word wasted. If a 2018 writer had this many incredibly good ideas in his head, this novel would be triple the length! And while I would actually have liked more development of certain ideas, the literary courage involved in not over-pumping this book deserves admiration, even today. So… I loved the re-read and I am happy to have spent an Audible credit on this, especially given that I now understand that in my teens I did NOT truly understand the ending! But I do need to admit that it is in no way perfect or timeless. Some (though surprisingly not that much) of the dialog is dated, the sex role stuff is antiquated, and so on. The surprise for me was to find some of the action downright clunky. The best example was when the traitorous lawyer Sheffield – who had been carefully prepped to capture Foyle by his Outer Satellites masters – completely failed to recognize Foyle when the man walked into his office. What – they don’t have cameras in the 25th century??? Anyway... quibbles are quibbles. This is still a great book, a seminal piece of SF, and a classic piece of cyberpunk written 40 years before cyberpunk existed! So… still a classic? Yep.

great book really enjoyed it

keep me entertained till the very end. would recommend it. five more words a a

a A Sci-Fi classic

This book was recommended to me as one of the top 15 sci fi classics of all time. I agree.